On Daniela Danz’s “Wildniß”

Daniela Danz gave a lecture titled “Hölderlins Wildniß” in 2020, in which she traces the origins of the Anthropocene to technical, economic, cultural, political, and environmental changes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Wildniß—the German title of Danz’s newest collection of poems—uses Hölderlin’s archaic spelling of “Wilderness” as a nod to her greatest influence, the poet whose language (first encountered when, as a teen, she turned on the radio to a broadcast of “Hyperion”!) awakened her to poetry’s possibilities.

But Danz hasn’t simply slapped a decorative word from Hölderlin’s lexicon onto the cover of her book; his wilderness reflects our contemporary landscape and her poetics. Wilderness for Hölderlin is literal and figurative. In the natural world, it is the profoundly non-human. Here, my translation of a fragment Danz uses as an epigraph:

          And like the surf
that consumes houses, rises
up, headless, and not sparing
a single room and covering the roads,
brewing unhindered, a steaming cloud:
                        the crude wilderness.

We encounter wilderness through a simile that, drawn from the ocean (the least known, most unknowable part of our planet) seems almost literal. It hits home to twenty-first-century readers when the speaker in “Come wilderness into our homes” welcomes rising sea levels as she invokes and conjures the inevitable demise of humans and our civilizations. Yet wilderness in Hölderlin—and in Danz—is also internal. Hölderlin’s self-estrangement arises not just out of his mental ailments but from his recognition of the profound disturbances in his time, in all human life. His work, Danz says, never “attempts to become familiar to its reader.” When I read Danz, and—in a most intimate act of reading—create new English forms for her poems, I’m ungrounded, not unlike Danz’s description of Hölderlin: “What he enters into is the impassable wilderness, that within him and that of the new era.” Danz’s speaker reveals the “impassable wilderness” in the landscapes we have wrought and the greater forces that govern us all; any sense of control we cling to is a refusal to recognize the fundamentally unfamiliar.